The Battery Park Hotel: Thomas Wolfe's Biscuit Cutter and the Man Who Built It

Thomas Wolfe, who grew up in Asheville and used it mercilessly as material, looked at the Battery Park Hotel and called it a biscuit cutter. He meant it as an insult, the building looked, he said, like a thousand other hotels of its era. And he was not entirely wrong. But the story of how it came to stand on that particular hill is worth knowing.

The site had held a grand Victorian hotel since eighteen eighty-six, the original Battery Park, a Queen Anne structure with two hundred seventy rooms and multiple turrets, built by Frank Coxe on the high ground overlooking downtown. By the nineteen twenties that building was aging, and E.W. Grove had designs on the property.

Grove was the Tennessee patent-medicine millionaire who had already transformed Asheville by building the Grove Park Inn in nineteen thirteen, a massive Arts and Crafts resort assembled from boulders blasted out of the surrounding hillside. In nineteen twenty-one he bought the Battery Park property, demolished the Victorian pile, and, crucially, leveled Battery Porter Hill itself, hauling away enough earth to change the topography of central Asheville and make room for a commercial district below.

The new Battery Park Hotel opened on September eighteenth, nineteen twenty-four: fourteen stories of brick, two hundred twenty rooms, rooftop dining with mountain views. It was completed in eleven months, a remarkable construction pace for its time. The design was efficient and modern and, yes, a little generic, which is what Wolfe meant about the biscuit cutter.

For five decades it was a center of Asheville's social life, hosting jazz musicians and politicians and the resort crowds that came by train from the Southeast. It closed in nineteen seventy-two. Since nineteen seventy-nine it has operated as a senior residential community, still standing at the center of downtown Asheville, the biscuit cutter that outlasted almost everything around it.